analysis of teaching and learning events
Catrin Webster lecture
crit with Dan Howard-Birt
bookmaking workshop with Clare Bryan
Catrin Webster lecture
Wednesday 5th October, Peckham Road Lecture Theatre
Catrin talked about the evolution of her practice, which is largely centred around landscape and investigation through making. She talked about the traditional approach to landscape, in the context of her background as a painter, and her intention to interrogate ideas around the sublime, landscape painting and the female embodied experience of landscape. Her description of how she spent time in the landscape – on bikes and in her van, creating opportunities to paint and film – really appealed to me, as well as the work she produced which is obviously about landscape, but is not that we might expect of landscape art. She talked about established conventions in painting – perspective, pictorial plane, vanishing points and so on – but how her overriding interest was what it felt like to be in the landscape and to be creating work in and from the landscape, in a way that sidestepped conventional ideas about the landscape and its traditional, constructed, significance. Catrin’s discussion of her approach helped me better understand some of my own intentions for developing a practice that was based around personal experiences of time spent in the landscape and signposted cultural geography as a potential avenue for my research.
bookmaking workshop with Clare Bryan
Friday 4th November printmaking MA studio
Clare’s workshop was an introduction into some simple forms of bookmaking with and without covers. She’s a great teacher – very clear and patient -and pitched the books we made just right, so that we all came away having produced a set of effective, small books that we could easily scale up and make more ambitious on our own. I had made a book as part of my degree but had viewed it as a repository for the writing we were required to submit, where Clare made me think about the book as a means of taking print from 2D into 3D and a mechanism for facilitating the viewer’s physical, tactile engagement with the work. These were both ideas that I was already thinking about at the back of my mind and, as I began to reflect on containment and preservation of fragile memory, I turned to book arts to look for a receptacle I could make that would hold and protect the print and object that held the memory of that walk with Dad and might help me navigate back to my feelings about him, the place and that day. Going forward, I want to explore the potential for artist’s books as a way of containing ‘vastness’, whether through multiples or folding.
Dan Howard-Birt crit
Wednesday 14th December, MA Printmaking studio
Dan came in to support us installing our pop-up show in our studio. Over 3 hours, we put all our pieces together to allow us to identify and discuss any commonalities before installing. Some already had clear ideas of how and where they wanted their work presented, but Dan encouraged us to discuss implications for other works and negotiate changes. I was interested in the way he looked for common themes beyond subject or concept, and also our discussion about how to present my pieces. Dan was keen to open my phase box to see what was inside and we discussed whether I would want to encourage viewers to engage with the box (I did), whether its contents were fragile and how I might feel if they were broken, but particularly how the viewer would feel if they were responsible for damage. I had not previously considered that I have some responsibility to the viewer from this perspective. The simple idea of plywood plinths elevated both pieces literally and figuratively, revealing the contents of the phase box and its purpose as a receptacle for memory without the viewer having to handle it. It helped me think about staging as a way to bring disparate pieces together and how it can make a statement about the work.